Plagiarism in submitted manuscripts: incidence, characteristics and optimization of screening-case study in a major specialty medical journal.

Janet R. Higgins,Feng-Chang Lin,James P. Evans

doi:10.1186/s41073-016-0021-8

Abstract

BackgroundPlagiarism is common and threatens the integrity of the scientific literature. However, its detection is time consuming and difficult, presenting challenges to editors and publishers who are entrusted with ensuring the integrity of published literature.MethodsIn this study, the extent of plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to a major specialty medical journal was documented. We manually curated submitted manuscripts and deemed an article contained plagiarism if one sentence had 80 % of the words copied from another published paper. Commercial plagiarism detection software was utilized and its use was optimized.ResultsIn 400 consecutively submitted manuscripts, 17 % of submissions contained unacceptable levels of plagiarized material with 82 % of plagiarized manuscripts submitted from countries where English was not an official language. Using the most commonly employed commercial plagiarism detection software, sensitivity and specificity were studied with regard to the generated plagiarism score. The cutoff score maximizing both sensitivity and specificity was 15 % (sensitivity 84.8 % and specificity 80.5 %).ConclusionsPlagiarism was a common occurrence among manuscripts submitted for publication to a major American specialty medical journal and most manuscripts with plagiarized material were submitted from countries in which English was not an official language. The use of commercial plagiarism detection software can be optimized by selecting a cutoff score that reflects desired sensitivity and specificity.

Highlights

Plagiarism is common and threatens the integrity of the scientific literature
Though other studies have noted that journals will reject manuscripts above a certain percentage level of similarity [7], the nuances involved in differentiating actual plagiarism from legitimate overlap with previously published material mean that a single iThenticate score cannot, in practice, stand alone as a test of plagiarism
Manuscripts were scored by country of origin and whether English was an official language of that country

Summary

Introduction

Plagiarism is common and threatens the integrity of the scientific literature. its detection is time consuming and difficult, presenting challenges to editors and publishers who are entrusted with ensuring the integrity of published literature. IThenticate does not analyze different sections of a given manuscript (e.g., abstract and introduction), an important limitation given that some sections of manuscripts by the same group will have legitimate overlap, e.g., in the “Methods” section [4]. Both the Committee on Publication Ethics [5] and the US Office of Research Integrity [6] note that some degree of copying in this context is often legitimate. Though other studies have noted that journals will reject manuscripts above a certain percentage level of similarity [7], the nuances involved in differentiating actual plagiarism from legitimate overlap with previously published material mean that a single iThenticate score cannot, in practice, stand alone as a test of plagiarism. We and others [8, 9] typically use manual verification, a time-consuming and subjective approach

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion